Our goal is to develop new knowledge useful to the creation of early intervention programs and in the prevention of the debilitating and refractory disturbances of adulthood. We will assess the ways in which the child and family are affected by and cope with the stresses of psychiatric disorder and hospitalization, and hope to identify precursor patterns in children predictive of later maladjustment. The sample presently consists of 219 parents and their families. There are 377 children between the ages of 7 and 15, including 243 children with a parent who had received a diagnosis of unipolar depression, bipolar affective illness, or schizophrenia. Our data will include measures of: 1) psychological functioning of the patient and spouse; 2) the environment, including family functioning, marital adjustment, parenting pracitices, and the child's phenomenological ratings of life events; 3) social cognitive, and personal competence relevant to normal childhood development,including: a) peer, teacher, parent, and self ratings; b) school records of academic and social adjustment; and c) laboratory measures of cognitive and perceptual motor skills; 4) early signs of precursors to the development of affective disorder or schizophrenia, including depressogenic cognitive and attributional styles, signs of depression, and cognitive slippage; 5) parental diagnostic status, the home environment, and the childhood indices of competence and vulnerability reasssessed at follow-up; 6) intermediate outcome for a supplementary sample of 82 children, previously assessed as school age who are now over age 18. Using these data sets, we intend to: 1) obtain depressed, bipolar, schizophrenic, or normal; 2) relate child characteristics to parental diagnosis and environmental variables in the home and school; 3) identify particularly vulnerable and invulnerable children; 4) assess the ways in which the child and family unit are affected by and cope with the stresses of psychiatric disorder and hospitalization; 5) identify childhood patterns related to adjustment at adolescence and young adulthood; and 6) identify precursors specific to the development of depression and schizophrenia.